On the heels of the discovery that fluoride caused tooth mottling, Public Health Service (PHS) scientist Trendley Dean, the first director of the National Institute of Dental Research, was sent west. As Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon had authority over the PHS, and Mellon founded and was the controlling shareholder of ALCOA.

Dean’s mission was to research communities where naturally occurring fluoride was high in the water supply, to see how much fluoride children’s teeth could absorb before disintegrating. There was an obvious conflict of interest in Dean’s research. Dean announced his results and made the statement that fluoride in the water supply decreased tooth decay in children. (Yet the actual data used by Dean is not conducive to that conclusion). [Yiamouyiannis, Fluoride and the Aging Factor, p. 99].

City

FluoridePPM

% of cavity-free children

% with fluorosis

Pueblo , CO

0.6

37

2.4

Junction City , CO

0.7

26

1.7

East Moline , IL

1.5

11

24.5

Monmouth , IL

1.7

55

42.1

Galesburg, IL

1.8

56

35.1

Colorado Springs

2.5

41

67.6

The only unmistakable trend is the one showing dental fluorosis increasing with fluoride concentration, which was expressly what Dean went west to determine. Black and McKay noted that mottled teeth did not seem to have a higher incidence of tooth decay, and Dean extended those findings, although that was not his job. A man was specifically assigned to investigate the damage a particular chemical did to teeth, but somehow concluded that the chemical was actually good for teeth.

To paraphrase Dean’s findings: “As children’s teeth disintegrate, they may have fewer cavities.” Dean is known today as the “father of fluoridation.” It has now been admitted by virtually everybody involved in the fluoridation issue, even by Dean himself (given under oath on a witness stand), that his early data gave zero evidence that increasing fluoride concentration in the water supply reduced tooth decay.